A concept paper on the importance of introducing parents to the multiple intelligences concept to help understand their child’s learning styles

Pages: 837-840
Asra Ali and Rajalakshmi M. S. (Department of Early Childhood Education and Administration, SMT.VHD Central Institute of Home Science, Bangalore)

Given all the debates about how children should be taught, it may come as a surprise to learn that students spend less than 15% of their time in school. While there’s no doubt that school is important, a clutch of recent studies reminds us that parents are even more so. A study published by researchers at North Carolina State University, Brigham Young University and the University of California-Irvine, for example, finds that parental involvement checking homework, attending school meetings and events, discussing school activities at home has a more powerful influence on students’ academic performance than anything about the school the students attend. Another study, published in the Review of Economics and Statistics, reports that the effort put forth by parents (reading stories aloud, meeting with teachers) has a bigger impact on their children’s educational achievement than the effort expended by either teachers or the students themselves. And a third study concludes that schools would have to increase their spending by more than $1,000 per pupil in order to achieve the same results that are gained with parental involvement. So parents matter a point made clear by decades of research showing that a major part of the academic advantage held by children from affluent families comes from the “concerted cultivation of children” as compared to the more laissez-faire style of parenting common in working-class families. Children who hear talk about counting and numbers at home start school with much more extensive mathematical knowledge, report researchers from the University of Chicago knowledge that predicts future achievement in the subject. Psychologist Susan Levine, who led the study on number words, has also found that the amount of talk young children hear about the spatial properties of the physical world how big or small or round or sharp objects are predicts kids’ problem-solving abilities as they prepare to enter kindergarten. Research by Nancy Hill, a professor at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Education, finds that parents play an important role in what Hill calls “academic socialization” setting expectations and making connections between current behavior and future goals (going to college, getting a good job). Engaging in these sorts of conversations, Hill reports, has a greater impact on educational accomplishment than volunteering at a child’s school or going to PTA meetings, or even taking children to libraries and museums. But often time’s parents are clueless about how to teach their children. They adopt methods that their parents adopted, or their peers recommend. They encourage rote learning, and resort to question and answer sessions, looking to verbatim repetitons of what is in the note book. A child who is not strong on language skills may find this burden. It is at this juncture that the approach to learning through Multiple Intelligences framework comes in handy to parents. If parents are sensitised to applying the MI approach in their childrens learning, then learning can be made fun, meaningful and with positive outcomes for both the children and parents.